A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [110]
“Thank you, Linda.” I gave her a particularly warm smile, and she smiled back, relaxing a little.
“You’re welcome, Aunt Ginny.”
Rose said, “You’ve got spills on that tray. Be careful.”
She went into the kitchen and shortly thereafter banged out the back door. I sipped my drink. Rose said, “It’s none of your business, Jess. Just stay out of it.”
Jess didn’t say anything.
“He humiliated you. Not only that, he set out weeks ago to humiliate you. He intended to humiliate both you and us, and to do it in public. The fact that he’s had an accident doesn’t change that.”
“I know.” Jess’s voice was low and rough, so unfamiliar to me that I didn’t know how to interpret the tone.
Rose said, “I know what you’re feeling. I really do, even if you don’t. You think you’re feeling sorry for him, but really you’re feeling that you can finally get to him, that he’ll soften toward you. If you help him, then he’ll be grateful, and then he’ll give you what you want. Well, he’s never going to do it.”
I said, “I don’t know—”
She continued speaking to Jess. “Ginny is eternally hopeful, you know. She never cuts her losses. She always thinks things could change.”
I said, “Harold could change. He could, you know, have remorse. Sometimes that happens when, you know, people lose things.” I’d almost said, see the light. I felt my face redden.
She continued to watch Jess, to address only him. “Not if you forgive him first. Not if you go to him. Not if you act like your mother did, Jess.”
I said, “Rose—”
When her face swiveled toward me, it was lit up with conviction. “He should know about how they were together, because that tells how Harold is and how he’s going to be.”
Jess muttered, “I know how they were together. She was pretty long-suffering.”
Rose exclaimed, “She always apologized, even when Harold was in the wrong! Even when he’d been yelling at her or had flown off the handle at her for no reason! She apologized. She told me once, she said, ‘Rose, it doesn’t do any good to hold out against him. He can hold out longer than I can. And then, he talks about it to everybody. He tells everybody I’m not speaking to him and makes a joke out of it. I think it’s just better to wait till he comes around and thinks better of his actions.’ But he never did! She didn’t make him, so why should he? Guilty conscience?”
Jess was staring at her.
I thought Rose should settle down, but she wasn’t saying anything untrue. She wasn’t even exaggerating. I said, “He didn’t really act like he valued her, Jess. When she found out I was marrying Ty, she said to me, ‘You’ve got to play hard to get, Ginny. If your mother were alive, she’d tell you the same thing. I’ve never played hard to get, and I regret it. I don’t mean with the young men, either. You’ve got to find a way for it to be hard for your husband to get you, too.’ ”
Jess said, “This is different.”
“Is it?” said Rose. Now her voice was low but penetrating. Her stare was like a small room he surely couldn’t get out of. In spite of everything, a part of me watched with interested detachment the way she surrounded him and captured his agreement. I recognized her intensity from all the years she had turned it on me. “He rejected you. He sent you away. He’s been after you for fourteen years, gonna do the same thing to you that you did to him. He set you up when you got here, and then he got his revenge. What kind of guy is that? If you really think he’s going to come around and have remorse, then give him some time to think about it. Give the cure some time to work. That’s my advice. You can go running to him all full of pity and compassion, but pity and compassion have never won Harold’s respect in the past, and if you don’t win his respect, eventually he’s going to humiliate you again, intentionally.”
Jess said, “Jesus.”
Rose set her glass on the coffee table, stood up, and went over to his chair, then she leaned over him, a hand on each arm of the chair. He stared at her.